I'm glad this thread was posted, because I had been a little worried about this too.
I've also been meaning to ask a couple questions about the DB repository:
1) Is there a reason there aren't nightly/weekly builds available? Unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem like it would be to hard to have a cron job run a script that mysqldumps the db (minus the account related tables of course) and commits it to the repository.
If the only concern is that it hasn't been thoroughly tested, maybe we could have an unstable along with the stable version. Doing so might actually improve testing. For example, I use the db on a private server, and I think I've found an error, I would gladly report it (and I have found and reported 1-2), but I'm also kind of reluctant to do so. Why? Well the db I'm working from isn't the one that peq is using on their server (I believe), and if I have the bug reporting system right, those bugs get reported to peq's server forums. That means I'm reporting bugs on a db that's months behind their db. I have to figure out A) has anyone reported this already in the last 4 months? B) Has this already been fixed because someone reported a slightly different but related problem or a more general problem? C)Is my experience of this bug the same as peq's or have other things in the zone changed which might affect this bug? etc. If I could load their "unstable" nightly build, I'd be much more efficient and finding (and reporting) db bugs/errors.
(NB: I'm not complaining about the lack of more frequent releases - don't look a gift horse in the mouth and all that - I'm just trying to understand the reasoning and point out a possible advantage to more frequent releases)
The other question I had is:
2) When committing the db to the repository, is it really better to gz the SQL and zip many of the files together? Certainly the initial space cost is lower (gz the SQL saves what, 130MB?) but I think over time (especially if the db were committed more often), it might make sense not to gzip those files. Except for player-specific tables (Accounts, characters, etc.) I have the impression that the db doesn't change all that drastically. I would guess (although I have no way to test this), that the diff files for the daily/weekly/monthly commits would be quite small. On the other hand, zipping it all up means that that file might as well just be uploaded completely. So while initially it might be 150 vs 20MB, I would be that after 10-15 commits or so it would be something like 160 vs 200, now with the unzipped db taking up less space (note: these numbers are completely made up and just meant to illustrate a point)
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